On Friday 10 December, 98 Itinerant Teachers of the Deaf (IToD) from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia, virtually spent A Day at the Australian Hearing Hub.
This full day workshop provided the ITODs with a chance to learn about the services, research and resources that are available from Australian Hearing Hub member organisations.
The attendees received presentations from a wide variety of experts across all the Australian Hearing Hub members organisations including Hearing Australia, National Acoustic Laboratories, The Shepherd Centre, NextSense, Macquarie University Hearing, and Cochlear Limited.
Presentation topics included
• Hearing Australia paediatric services,
• Beyond Speech: Roads to effective communication research project,
• Executive Function Intervention in 4-5 year old’s with hearing loss
• Predicting language outcomes using the FLI-P guide intervention,
• Cochlear implant technology in the classroom,
• Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder (ANSD) in the paediatric population, barries and facilitators to social interaction in the classroom,
• an overview of current studies on paediatric hearing loss at NAL and introducing the prototype of Early Childhood hearing and Talking Observations (ECHO) – an observation checklist for early childhood educators to identify listening and communications difficulties.
The afternoon session provided the audience with the opportunity to discuss the listening and communication challenges experienced by them and their students, and to provide suggestions to Australian Hearing Hub member researchers about future research ideas. These ideas have been documented and will be shared once collated.
This event was a collaboration between the Australian Hearing Hub and the NextSense Institution and was so warmly received that we are sure we will host a similar event again in 2022.
